Systems Thinking

The five most surprising insights from a comprehensive systems engineering textbook that will change how you think about problem-solving.

A deep dive into how biological systems achieve remarkable resilience through decentralized design, offering lessons for human engineering and crisis response.

A comprehensive exploration of how technological innovation is shaped by path dependency, structural lock-in, and biomimicry as a pathway to more resilient design systems.

A historical and systems analysis of how institutional success can harden into a source of adaptive failure.

Modernity rests on the monumental flows of energy, goods, and data, creating a paradox of scale.

Genghis Khan reorganized his entire society around multiples of 10. This seemingly simple change created a military structure so effective it was copied by armies for centuries – and its principles still apply to modern organizations.

An exploration of the hidden costs and externalities of convenience in modern systems, from design philosophy to political economy.

This post examines the two most common non-economic explanations for why poor countries stay poor: corruption and culture. It evaluates the empirical relationship between corruption and growth, asks why culturally identical countries at different levels of development exhibit different behavioral patterns, and traces the historical use of cultural argument as post-hoc justification for development outcomes.

This post examines the development strategies of today's wealthiest nations during the centuries in which they became wealthy, drawing on archival evidence from Britain, the United States, Germany, Japan, and other industrial powers. It places those strategies alongside the policy prescriptions those same countries currently deliver to the developing world. The gap between what rich countries did and what they now recommend is the central subject of the inquiry.

This post examines the dominant narrative about globalization — its origins, its internal logic, and its relationship to the actual historical record. Drawing on comparative development data from the post-war period through the present, it asks whether the policies prescribed to poor countries today bear any resemblance to the policies that made rich countries rich. The stakes are not academic: how a country understands the history of capitalism determines whether it believes it has options.